Christina Rosetti -a 19th century poetess

  Christina Rosetti was a poet of Italian descent in the nineteenth century. Her father was also a poet. She had two brothers and one sister -two of her siblings also became writers and the other an artist. From the age of fourteen, when she suffered a nervous breakdown, she started to have bouts of depression. It was after this that she, her mother and her sister became interested in the Anglo-Catholic Movement. Rosetti turned deeply religious and refused two of her suitors due to religious reasons.
  Her first poem was published at the age of eighteen and Goblin Market at thirty-one. Goblin Market received widespread praise and established Rosetti as the main female poet of the time.
  Rossetti was a volunteer worker from 1859 to 1870 at the St. Mary Magdalene "house of charity" in Highgate, a refuge for former prostitutes and it is suggested Goblin Market may have been inspired by the "fallen women" she came to know. She was ambivalent about women's suffrage, but many scholars have identified feminist themes in her poetry. She was opposed to slavery (in the American South), cruelty to animals (in the prevalent practice of animal experimentation), and the exploitation of girls in under-age prostitution. 
   Feminists held her as symbol of constrained female genius, placed as a leader of 19th century poets. Her work strongly influenced the work of such writers as Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Jennings, and Philip Larkin. Critic Basil de Selincourt stated that she was "all but our greatest woman poet … incomparably our greatest craftswoman … probably in the first twelve of the masters of English verse". Rossetti is honoured with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on April 27.